


take me to church

by stiction



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, One-Sided Attraction, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 06:17:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7033039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something slammed into her. Her back hit the kitchen wall so hard that the plaster cracked, dust trickling down into her hair and onto the lenses of her glasses. The phone was on the floor, light shining up into her face. And Rose’s.</p>
<p>Jade grasped at the forearm across her throat; it was as skinny as ever, but held strong against her, leaving her breathless.</p>
<p>“Hey, buddy,” she gasped, eyes darting from Rose’s narrowed eyes to her bared teeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take me to church

Jade was awake for it.

She could hear them, a few rooms away, the telltale knock of Kanaya’s headboard against the wall facing the hallway. She had seen Kanaya’s room more or less, and against her better judgment imagined how it must look, the two of them tangled together under the gauzy green curtain Kanaya had hung from the ceiling.

And Rose – she thought of Rose the way she had thought of her when they were in college, always more of a shadow than a girl. Someone to protect albeit with a little ulterior motivation on her side. Jade knew that that torch had burnt out years ago, but sometimes, when they sat up until the sun rose complaining into mugs of oversteeped tea and liquor, it felt like they had never left Jade’s old apartment.

Jade had mulled it over a few times now, after meeting Fef and buying the studio together and Rose slinking back into her life as casually as a cat that’s been missing for days shows up again, pawing at the back door to be let in. And if Rose had come back earlier, if Fef had left to make her home in the ocean the way she’d planned to years ago…

But that, she refused to think about. There had been a month or two where Jade couldn’t stand to stay at home, where Feferi was sulking in the bathtub taking cold saltwater baths that lasted all day and Jade would come back after running for hours and climb in, her muscles trembling with exhaustion. And Fef’s gills would flare as she reached for the hem of Jade’s old t-shirt, tugged out the hair band that held her sweaty ponytail and her composure together. It was always so cold and Jade’s throat felt so tight and it almost hurt how much she held back and –

And the knocking on the wall stopped.

She reached for her glasses, mouth dry with thirst, and stumbled to the kitchen for a drink. The water had barely touched her lips before the knocking was back, and faster, turning into thumps.

Jade set the glass back on the counter.

She walked back to the bedroom, pace quickening with the rhythm across the hall, and pulled her shirt over her head before she climbed into Feferi’s recuperacoon. It was as sticky and uncannily warm as ever, sinking into the thick sopor as Fef began to stir.

Rose’s voice carried across the hall, and in the dark of the coon Feferi whispered sweet, drugged nothings into Jade’s ear.

 

* * *

 

It took her almost two hours to get all the sopor out of her hair the next morning.   
  


* * *

 

 

The problem wasn’t that Rose didn’t show up to the studio for four days. She came and went when the winter thawed, and if she went more than she came, it was hardly a big deal.

The problem was that Rose hadn’t shown up to the studio in four days and Jade promptly realized that she didn’t know where Rose lived once Kanaya had taken to running through her dances with a vicious intent Jade had rarely seen in her.

She had also slipped back into her old habits of never cooking her meat, or even using silverware, and in Jade’s opinion, that was just plain gross.

“Did something happen with you two?” Jade pried late on day four, cornering Kanaya in the kitchen while the troll was cooking dinner. She kept her eyes on the table as Kanaya’s shoulders squared. It was futile, she knew; even though she and Kanaya were most likely thinking of the same thing (the knocking bed, two in the morning on Friday night), they had always been more into small talk.

Jade took a loud sip from her mug.

“I’m… not sure,” Kanaya sighed, splitting the package of raw beast into thirds and setting two pieces into the frying pan.

Jade snorted, her eye-roll completely wasted on Kanaya’s back.

“Were you really that bad in bed?”

The meat sizzled in the pan.

It was the only sound in the apartment, and Jade felt a pang of regret that she hadn’t tagged along on Feferi’s grocery trip – especially considering that when Fef did the shopping, she frequently forgot to buy anything other than raw meat and fish.

Jade chanced a glance upwards. Standing before the stovetop, Kanaya’s shoulders were rigid, and a hot green flush was working its way up the back of her neck, scales flaring veridian.

“I’m going out,” Kanaya muttered finally. “If you would finish dinner, I would greatly appreciate it.”

She stalked out without saying anything further, and after a few moments alone with the cooking meat she heard the apartment door slam. Kanaya, she knew, was making sure to stomp loud enough for human ears.

“Touchy,” she sighed to the empty room, and got up to take care of the food on the stove.

 

* * *

 

Kanaya didn’t come back until late that night, coming quiet up the stairs like she thought Jade would be asleep.

She knew Kanaya was trying to avoid her because she didn’t pass by the door in the hallway to go to her own side; instead she paused outside it. Jade held her breath and waited until the troll knocked softly, almost too soft for her to hear, though she would’ve been able to tell anyways from the upwards flick of Fef’s fins.

Feferi let her hair drop out of the coil she’d been building and glanced back at Jade, who shrugged.

“She wants you, I think,” Jade whispered, and Fef sighed heavily, pushing her chair back from the mirror and shrugging into a robe before she answered the door.

In the bed, Jade strained to listen, but couldn’t quite make out what was being said until Feferi came back into the room, a thoroughly abashed Kanaya in tow.

“What’s wrong?” Jade asked, and fumbled for her glasses on the nightstand.

The look on Kanaya’s face made her stomach twist.

“What happened?” she pressed again.

“I…” Kanaya shoved her hands into her pockets and stared at the foot of the bed. “It’s difficult to explain, but… Rose only wants to speak to you at the moment. She would hardly let me stand in the doorway.”

Jade rolled out of bed immediately, ignoring Kanaya’s look of mortification concerning her state of undress, and kicked around in the dim light until she found her jeans from earlier.

“Let’s go,” she ordered, buttoning her pants up as she walked out the door. Behind her she heard Feferi handing Kanaya a pair of her shoes.

She felt satisfied by the fact that even Kanaya, queen of the diva legs, had trouble keeping up with her. Even as she snatched her shoes and shoved them on without slowing, she could hear the huff of indignation behind her.

“Fill me in,” Jade said, once they were a block down and Kanaya hadn’t offered any explanation.

“As I said before, it’s difficult to explain.”

“That’s fine and all, but if you think you’re going to get me out of bed at two in the morning and tell me my best friend, who’s been missing for days now, needs me for some mysterious reason that’s _too difficult_ to explain, you have got another thing coming.”

Kanaya grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop so fast Jade could hear her neck crack.

“Listen to me,” she hissed, looming up over Jade with her wrist in an iron grip. “Contrary to popular belief, I care about Rose a great deal. And _un_ like you, I don’t have years of experience with her to back me up in a crisis situation.”

“Then-”

“ _No_. I didn’t push it when she left because I didn’t want to push _her_. Obviously that was a mistake, but if what I think is happening is actually happening, we have much bigger problems than the emotional disparity between me and my matesprit.”

It took Jade a moment to realize that her knees were trembling. She knew that if Kanaya squeezed her wrist any tighter, her bones would splinter. She also knew that Kanaya was very firmly not all there at the moment, evident in her aggressive posture, the streetlight glinting in her eyes and the fact that her fangs were so _long_ and so _sharp_ and bared just _so_ , just a few inches from Jade’s face.

Everything slotted neatly into place.

“Holy shit,” Jade breathed. “You didn’t…”

Kanaya was panting, and Jade could feel the rapid fire pulse of her heartbeat through the loosening grip on her arm.

“ _Did_ you?”

Her fingers tingled when Kanaya let go completely, mouth settling into a tight-lipped grimace as she turned and kept walking, pace quickened so that Jade was the one jogging to catch up.

“We don’t have time to go into specifics.”

“How about a quick low-down?” Jade flexed her fingers, still a little numb. “Vague hypothesis? Anything that might in theory distract me from the terrifying possibility at hand?”

Kanaya snorted. “It’ll only be terrifying if the clinic’s closed.”

It was hardly reassuring, but Jade could still feel the tightness in her throat, and with Rose on the line here, delaying any longer wasn’t an option. She could only follow Kanaya farther into the cramped side streets of the city.

Jade’s toes were starting to ache with the cold by the time Kanaya stopped mid-stride, so abrupt that Jade nearly knocked her front teeth out on the troll’s back.

She was startled out of her thoughts, the A-to-Z catalogue of everything she had learned about contractible Alternian diseases and their cures before dropping out of college. (Most of this knowledge came from biology classes, but Jade would admit, if pressed and feeling loose-tongued, that her freshman year exploits with the rougher species had led to some interesting discussions with the campus clinic workers.)

It kept coming back to Kanaya. There wasn’t much that she made known about herself; Jade had been living across the hall from her for almost a year now, and aside from dancing, tailoring, designing, and Rose, she had no idea what Kanaya did all day. Fef, for all that she was allegedly a trusted confidante of the jadeblood, barely knew much more.

Fef had explained it once, pillow talking at the end of a long day of renovations about a month after Kanaya moved in. It was something to do with her caste, the life of a troll in the brooding caverns – she spoke little, and quietly, because there was not much to say to grubs, and disturbing the creatures that lived under Alternia’s surface was never wise. While their generation had only a short amount of time on Alternia before settling on Earth became their most viable option, old habits died hard.

And in Kanaya’s case, anomalous conditions never died.

Kanaya’s shoulders, Jade noticed, were shaking, a slight movement so fast that it looked like she was vibrating. Jade followed her gaze upwards, to the upper stories of a building so dark that living inside seemed a vaguely menacing impossibility.

“That’s where Rose lives?” Jade asked, looking from window to window, half of which were broken.

“Yes.”

“…You’re kidding me, right?”

“No.” Kanaya’s shoulders drew up and back, and Jade couldn’t help but roll her eyes – it was the pride thing, the thing Feferi did when strangers on the subway leaned too close to Jade or tried to talk to her. Kanaya might not have had the fins to flare, but Jade knew better than to rely on just that.

“Then let’s go,” she said, stepping past Kanaya. She was determined not to seem cowed by the way the building loomed up before her. They were far off the main roads of town, far beyond where Jade felt comfortable running in the warmer months.

Jade was halfway through the foyer when she realized that Kanaya had stopped in the doorway. She raised her arms in question, but the troll didn’t meet her eyes, staring instead at where her toes touched the threshold.

“Kanaya,” she said.

The reaction was delayed, and when their gazes met Kanaya’s faltered first.

“I’m… not certain that I should come in,” the troll said finally. Her voice was pitched lower than normal, and Jade shivered. “Rose might not feel amicably about seeing me at the moment.”

Her posture had deflated a little, and she had lost the edge that made her normal carriage intimidating. For the first time since they had met, Jade felt a twinge of pity for the jadeblood. 

It was novel. 

“What floor?” she asked, and relief flashed in Kanaya’s eyes.

“Fourth,” Kanaya said. “The room at the end of the hallway.”

“Okay. Just wait here, then.”

Jade turned back to the staircase, but her feet felt heavy, and the grime didn’t welcome her upwards.

“Be careful,” Kanaya called, as she forced herself to start climbing.

Despite the situation, Jade felt the corners of her mouth quirk upwards. The fact that Kanaya was showing any regard for her safety was remarkable, whether or not it had anything to do with Feferi.

“Always am.”

Jade pulled her phone out from her pocket, praying as she turned the flashlight on that the battery would hold up. The glare of the light on the steps was sharp, and she almost wanted to turn it back off, if only to avoid seeing the cracked tiling and the places where the dirt had become black.

Four floors up, she pushed open the door to the landing and felt the chill of the air run straight through her clothes.

She had tried to imagine where Rose lived before this, and it was always someplace with a snobbish edge. Back in college, before they had parted ways, Rose had been well-groomed and dressed in clothes that, despite lacking designer logos, were clearly for those who had money to blow.

It hadn’t been a problem, per se, and yes, Jade had seen immediately that the Rose who had strolled back into her life a year and a half ago was thinner, less with elegance than with negligence, and her clothes were ill-fitting and spoke of the thrift shops a few turns away from Main street, but she had never imagined this.

And she had never asked. Rose’s composure had neverleft much room for asking.

But standing here, squinting through the darkness to the room at the end of the hall, where the light didn’t quite reach, Jade could feel her stomach tighten in that telltale wave of guilt. When all this was over, she would push for answers. Rose still had a soft spot for her, and Jade was not above hitting below the belt when it came down to it.

She had been advancing without thinking, slow shuffling steps, and now stood staring at the door. There was a peephole, but she could see no light through it, nothing shining at the gaps in the doorframe.

Jade knocked.

The room behind was silent, and another knock was just as futile. She tried the doorknob, and it turned without protest.

“Rose?” she called. It sounded weak, barely echoing back to her. She put a hand to her throat, swallowed around the tremble. “Rose, I’m coming in.”

She used the toe of her boot to push the door open.

Beyond the harsh ring of light from her phone, the room was nearly empty. Ahead of her there was nothing, and as Jade took a tentative step inside and to the right of the door, the vague outline of a kitchen table appeared. There was no stove, at least not that she could see, a small refrigerator that had likely not been on for some time, and when she moved forward, breathing deeply to ease the pounding of her heart, she stepped on something that crunched.

She yelped in surprise, a reflexive shriek that was deafening in the silence – and something slammed into her. Her back hit the kitchen wall so hard that the plaster cracked, dust trickling down into her hair and onto the lenses of her glasses.

The phone was on the floor, light shining up into her face. And Rose’s.

Jade grasped at the forearm across her throat; it was as skinny as ever, but held strong against her, leaving her breathless.

“Hey, buddy,” she gasped, eyes darting from Rose’s narrowed eyes to her bared teeth.

They were long, too long, and though her heart was banging in her ears Jade held fast to Rose’s forearm. She could feel the fever burning her friend up, skin searing underneath her fingertips, and focused on that, focused on breathing slowly.

Jade could hear footsteps in the staircase – god bless Kanaya, come to investigate – but kept her eyes locked on Rose’s.

“Thirsty?” she asked. Her throat had begun to burn.

Rose’s face twitched, the snarl of her mouth slackening for the instant before Kanaya burst through the door, flashlight falling from her hand. The pressure on Jade’s neck disappeared and she dropped to the floor, coughing.

The two were a tangle of dark shapes, hisses undercut by Kanaya’s rumbling growl. Jade fumbled for her phone, turning the light on them and climbing to her feet.

Kanaya was winning by virtue of being tall and broad, shoving Rose to the ground on her stomach and pinning her with a knee to her back.

“Stay down,” she growled, and Rose stilled, her wrists held between her shoulderblades in one of Kanaya’s hands.

The back of Jade’s neck prickled, adrenaline making her hands shake as she edged slowly towards Kanaya’s forgotten flashlight. It was heavy in her hands, and she almost dropped it when Kanaya leaned down and sank her teeth the back of Rose’s neck.

“Holy shit,” Jade whispered. “Kanaya, holy shit what the _fuck_ -”

There was no answer, but Kanaya sat back up after a heavy moment, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She slid an arm under Rose’s waist and lifted her over one shoulder like she was hefting one of their gym mats.

“Come on,” Kanaya said. She strode past Jade, who still stood frozen, clutching the flashlight. “She won’t make a fuss now, but I don’t know for how long.”

Jade followed, swallowing hard around the bile in the back of her throat.

 

* * *

 

 

The clinic, Kanaya explained in clipped phrases, was a twenty minute walk from Rose’s apartment (a term that Jade thought generous, all things considered).

Jade was relieved to find the streets as empty as they were earlier; as run-down as this sector was, she still thought they would have a hard time explaining the tiny human slung over Kanaya’s shoulder, let alone the ragged puncture marks on the nape of her neck. The ones that Jade couldn’t stop staring at.

Those ones.

“When we get there,” Kanaya said, having lost the gravel edge to her words. “You will have to be the one to accompany her inside.”

Jade didn’t bother asking why. Almost 300 years since the Condesce’s first ships landed in old Seattle, and some of the old laws had yet to be repealed. Immense inheritance and hemoclassism aside, it was why the apartment was in Jade’s name, not Feferi’s – why they kept the doors bolted tight during the winter heat.

“I have to tell them what the problem is,” Jade replied, her stomach twisting. “Is it human-run?”

“I think. I hope.” Kanaya made to speak, but stopped. When she continued, her tone was less confident. “I might have a way out of this, but for now… Tell them it was a rogue–in the eighth sector. You would know it, the place by the docks?”

“Yeah.”

“A decent portion of that is unpatrolled. Undocumented.”

“Oh,” Jade said.

“It’s that, or Rose will be charged.” Kanaya kept her gaze to the road ahead. “As would I. You followed that case last winter.”

She dug her hands into her pockets, clenching hard. She knew how the process worked, at least vaguely. If they reported infection happening in the eighth sector, there would be a sweep of the area. Jade knew that if some poor dumb soul happened to have markers similar enough to Kanaya’s to be a match… Well, odds were that poor dumb soul wouldn’t have much of anything anymore. Rose would be forced to testify if she wanted to fare any better.

She nodded, and they didn’t speak again until Kanaya stopped on a street corner in a slightly better-lit section of town.

“It’s down there,” Kanaya said, nodding towards a small building a short way down the road. “Can you carry her?”

Jade tried to smile.

“You’ve seen me lift Fef.”

“I have.” Kanaya slid Rose off her shoulder, holding her out without a tremble of her arms until Jade had gotten her arms under the blonde’s knees and back. “Be careful in there. I’ll be waiting.”

Jade shifted her hold so that Rose’s head laid a little further away from her neck. She didn’t like the thought of those new teeth she had seen, no matter how limp her friend was at the moment. Even through Rose’s clothes and her own, the fever made her skin burn.

“I’ll take care of her,” she promised, and turned the corner. She pointedly avoided thinking about the danger they might be in–the details of their cover story were foggy enough to be dangerous, and if the workers here pushed her for details, she would have to lie–and instead focused on the danger they were definitely in.

Rose’s head lolled to the side, her forehead touching Jade’s neck. Her skin was on fire.

The clinic doors stuck when she pulled the handle, and Jade felt the sheer panic like a punch to the gut. She tightened her hold on Rose and tugged harder.

She was aware of a low groan, a minute stiffening of Rose’s back when she was jostled, and wrenched the door open.

There were four people in the lobby, all of whom turned to stare.

“It’s- it’s my friend,” Jade managed, still breathing hard and ignoring how Rose’s groaning had turned to mumbling. “I think she was bitten.”

“Get the stretcher,” said one of the trolls standing by the reception desk, and two of the workers rushed back through a pair of double doors. He was tall, eyes a dark blue, and loomed over Jade as he hurried forward. “By whom?”

“I don’t know. I-I hadn’t seen her for a few days, and when I went to check on her, she attacked me.”

Jade’s palms were damp, and the panic had become a whole-body affair, her heart pounding. She knew he could hear it, but hoped that he took it as a reasonable level of concern for a friend.

The two assistants–one human, the other a shorter troll–came back through the double doors with a stretcher.

“Lay her down,” said the troll, whose nametag read Sinthe. Jade laid Rose onto the stretcher as gently as she could, and the others hurried to unroll the straps from the sides of the stretcher, locking her in tight. “We’ll take it from here.”

They were gone in another instant, leaving Jade and the receptionist in silence.

“Want some coffee?” the troll behind the desk asked, and Jade nodded. The adrenaline rush was fading fast, leaving exhaustion in its wake, and she accepted the warm styrofoam cup with shaking hands.

 

* * *

 

 

Jade sat in the waiting room for four hours. Her phone would’ve died, had the receptionist not offered his own charger when she mentioned it, but she hardly did anything with it, just stared idly at the ticking clock and kept opening and closing her pictures. There was one of her and Rose from college, one that she had transferred from her old phone to this one.

In the picture, they stood smiling in front of Niagara Falls. Well, Jade was smiling. Rose’s mouth was shaped in something like a smile, but leaner, enigmatic. Years ago Rose hadn’t really made many facial expressions.

At the Falls, however, not in the picture but later, after Jade had backed right up into the deluge of a chute and found herself suddenly soaked, Rose had smiled. Jade knew because she had looked up, fumbling to wipe the water from her glasses, and Rose had been doubled over, hands over her face while she shook with laughter.

She thought of that when one of the nurses–the human one, a short girl who looked as weary as Jade felt–called her in to see Rose.

Jade had never learned the exact process of stopping and reversing the transition into parasitic vampirism; she had skipped that chapter of her Alternobiology textbook, distracted by a rustblooded lab partner who was eager to move on to the practical aspects of intensive dual-species anatomical studies. (It hadn’t been on the final, she had been relieved to find.)

(The vampirism, that was.)

But she had a pretty good idea of how everything went.

It wasn’t pretty.

There was one visible port in Rose’s jugular the width of Jade’s thumb, and tubes trailing out from under the thin hospital blanket. She was pale, paler than normal, and her chest barely rose and fell. Jade stepped closer, easing into a chair at the side of the bed. The sight of the port up close made her stomach churn; she could see where it had been connected to its own tube earlier, during the initial flush. It was capped now, and the only machine still running was the heart rate monitor, beeping softly in time with the pounding in Jade’s ears.

Rose had an IV in her arm, hooked to another dark bag of blood.

It was hard to resist the temptation to check Rose’s teeth, to make sure they had gone back to normal. Jade leaned in a little, eyeing Rose’s lips where they hung open slightly. She could see the shadowed line of the other girl’s teeth, nothing pushing out over the bottom row, and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Can I help you?”

Jade turned her head so fast she felt her neck crack.

Rose was staring back at her, eyes hazy. It looked like she had bad gas pains, but Jade figured she was probably just trying to arch her brow.

“How do you feel?” Jade asked.

“Like I just had my circulatory system violently purged. That’s what happened, right?”

“Yep.”

“Great,” Rose sighed, rolling her shoulders until her neck cracked. Her voice was raspy. “Where’s Kanaya?”

Jade leaned past the curtain, checking to make sure the room was empty.

“Allegedly, ‘figuring this out’. We figured the whole accident angle wouldn’t fly, what with how hard the regime is cracking down lately.”

Rose made a face.

“I see.” She traced the rim of the port in her neck. “It really was an accident, though-”

Jade’s stomach sank as a new doctor stepped into the room. The look on her face, stressed and pale beneath a fraying bun, made Jade almost certain that she had heard. The doctor scarcely looked at her until she had set the small caddy she was carrying on the side table, and even then it was a sidelong glance.

“If you’ll excuse us,” the woman said. “There’s still work to be done here.”

From behind the doctor’s back Rose met Jade’s gaze. There was no tremble in the look.

Jade was out the door in the next moment, swallowing around the lump in her throat. Rose was a resilient beast, but the regime had been around for eternities. The regime was _built_ to outlast opposition. They had very nearly starved Earth out before the treaty–-one tiny frail thing would almost certainly shatter under the weight of the Condesce’s spangly heel.

The air in the clinic felt heavy, antiseptic stench cloying in Jade’s throat as she wound her way through the hallways and towards the front door.

Turning the corner, she found her face shoved up into an unfamiliar chest–hard and ridged and smelling faintly of sulfur–before she was knocked backwards.

“Hey!” the troll spat down at her, and Jade fumbled to push her glasses up her nose and jump to her feet. They didn’t hesitate to step right back up to her, shoving her shoulders so she took an unsteady step back.

She braced herself for another shove, arms halfway up to block, but the troll had stopped. Instead of a snarl, there was a widening smile on their face.

“Heyyy,” they drawled, voice a sudden octave higher. “You wouldn’t happen to be–”

They paused, and dug into one of their jacket pockets. Jade reassessed the situation. The troll was a blueblood, hair unruly but wrangled into a braid, and dressed in a way that maybe, possibly, but only on an instinctive basis, identified them as female.

She would roll with it.

“Aha!” the troll said finally, pulling out a crumpled piece of scrap paper and smoothing it out. “I’m looking for a… Jade? Maybe? I can’t read this.”

“That’s… Well, I think that’s me,” Jade said hesitantly. She knew there was nothing about this that she could trust, but at the same time, there was little chance that someone so haphazard could’ve been sent by the regime.

“Great!” The troll stuck out a hand. Jade shook it, trying not to think about whether the stuff under those nightmare claws was blood or dirt. “The name’s Vriska. I’m here for the tiny one.”

“Rose?”

“Sure,” Vriska responded, pushing past her. “Come on, we don’t have much time before the receptionist snaps out of it.”

Jade hustled to catch up; Vriska wasn’t quite as tall as Kanaya, but she had a good few inches of advantage, and it seemed to be mostly leg.

“Not that I don’t appreciate it, but what exactly are you doing here?”

Vriska shrugged absently, peeking around a corner before striding into the hallway.

“I owed Fussyfangs a favor from like, forever ago, and just my luck, she calls me up at half past fuck o’clock in the morning to cash in on it. What room’s the midget in?”

“Down there on the right.” Jade pointed to the door she had left from. “But there’s a doctor in there with her.”

“Troll or human?”

“Human.”

Vriska scoffed and waved a hand in the air, narrowly avoiding Jade’s face.

“Don’t worry about that. Just let me do my thing.”

Jade shoved her hands in her pockets. If this went south, there was no way any of them would make it out of the clinic, let alone the city, without being promptly caught and thrown into jail to rot.

Vriska stopped in front of the door. “This one?”

“Yeah.”

“Gotcha.”

The troll took a deep breath, then kicked the door in so hard that the tiny windowpane cracked. Jade yelped, jumping back before she recollected the nerve to follow Vriska inside.

The scene was confusing, to say the least.

Vriska was shutting off machines with a manic air, and Rose’s discontent could have leveled a small town, but she too was disconnecting everything that tied her to the room, even gingerly sliding the IV out of her arm. Jade moved to help, but stopped short, tripping over the doctor’s limp body.

“You killed her?” she hissed, scrambling up onto the bed by Rose’s feet.

“Nah,” Vriska laughed and tapped her temple. “She’s just asleep.”

Rose frowned harder.

Vriska double checked the machines, then leaned down, opening her arms to Rose. “Come on, princess. Your carriage awaits.”

Rose’s lip curled.

“Um,” Jade said. “Maybe I should be the one to carry her.”

The tension didn’t dissipate. She edged towards Rose, extending one hand to pull her forward; to her relief, Rose took it, but neither she nor Vriska broke eye contact.

“Let’s just go,” Rose murmured coldly. She allowed Jade to pick her up, bundled carefully in a spare hospital robe.

Vriska led the way, grumbling and with squared shoulders.

There were two nurses sprawled across the floor of the lobby, not moving an inch except for the rise and fall of their chests as they (thankfully) continued to breathe. Jade stopped when she saw the receptionist. He was sitting perfectly still, eyes focused on something an eternity away.

“What did you do to him?” Jade whispered, walking quick to catch up with Vriska as they left the clinic.

“Hmm? Who?” Vriska was scoping out the parking lot and the street beyond.

“The receptionist.”

“Oh, him. The sleep thing doesn’t work on trolls, so I just… distracted him a little. It’s no big deal.”

Rose’s grip on Jade’s shirt tightened into a surprisingly strong fist.

Vriska waved them over to a dark corner of the parking lot.

“I have someone coming to pick us up,” she explained. “But it’s still not safe to hang out in the middle of the light.”

She pulled out her phone and dialed, but before she could say a word, a sleek black car pulled up alongside them.

“Get her in the back.” Vriska yanked both doors open on the passenger side and ducked inside, still looking around. “Thanks for being on time, asshat.”

Jade could hardly see a thing inside the car; the driver was lit only by the dashboard, red glowing dials and gauges. It was another troll, thick build, and tall enough to be hunched over the wheel. Her knowledge of Alternian car manufacturing was spotty at best, but a ride like this had to be pricey enough to at least imply highbloodedness.

It took her a moment to key back into the moment, listening in to what was happening above the background hum of the motor.

“I can’t believe that a quick drive around the block took you that long,” Vriska sighed, slouching down in her seat and throwing her feet up onto the dashboard.

“Don’t do that,” the driver said. His voice was a quiet rumble, but Vriska took her feet down nonetheless.

The car fell into silence, and the tapping of Vriska’s claws on the center console matched the flinching in Rose’s hand.

Vriska twisted around in her seat and pinned Jade with another toothy smile.

“How’s the patient?” she asked. There was next to nothing in her voice that convinced Jade she actually cared. “Still with us?”

Rose’s eyes were shut, but Jade knew she was awake. There was an innate carriage to Rose’s shoulders when she was awake.

“Sleeping,” Jade lied. “Like I wish I was.”

Vriska laughed, one short ha that cast the teeth in her lower jaw in the red light of the dashboard.

“We’re just about back, anyways, and after that I imagine you won’t be able to pry her from Fussyfang’s glowing embrace.”

Jade felt Rose’s fingers on her wrist squeeze tight. She, too, didn’t like something in Vriska’s tone.

The rest of the ride went quietly, broken only by occasional needling remarks exchanged by Vriska and the shadowy driver in Alternian. Jade wished, very acutely now, that she had kept up with her fluency after college.

At long last, Vriska stretched her arms over her head and yawned deep.

“Home sweet home,” she sighed. “And there’s the drinker herself.”

Jade craned her neck, but the edge of the window was high and the tint too dark to make out anything other than a dim light coming from the front of the studio.

“Um,” she said. “Thanks?”

Vriska flopped a hand in the air.

“Like I said, I had a favor to return. Now scram before the drones hunt you down.” She followed the joke with a wink, but it didn’t ease the tension in Jade’s chest.

Jade edged towards the car door, still half-cradling Rose in her arms. She managed to get out, Rose’s short fingernails digging into her arm with fear or cold; though she didn’t know which one it was she felt it just the same. Glancing around at the darkened buildings as she hustled across the street was instinctive.

Dawn was just breaking, the sky lightening. Kanaya opened the door for them, then slammed it shut the next instant, fastening the heaviest deadbolt first.

“Is she awake?” Kanaya asked. Her hands were clasped tight against her stomach and Jade could hear the gravely edge of her voice.

Jade hesitated, and Rose answered with another squeeze to her wrist.

“No. Not right now.”

With a trembling hand, Kanaya smoothed a strand of blonde hair off of Rose’s forehead.

“Vriska didn’t… didn’t do anything to her, did she?”

Jade shook her head, a slight dizziness returning with every motion. “Just the staff at the clinic.”

Kanaya’s breath of relief ghosted over the bridge of Jade’s nose, ruffling Rose’s bangs.

“Come on,” Jade turned towards the stairs. “Let’s get her to bed.”

 

* * *

 

 

Fef was asleep–Jade could hear the soft glubs coming from the recuperacoon as soon as she nudged their apartment door open–so she carried Rose instead, in all her hospital-gowned glory, into Kanaya’s room. But once she had laid her friend down on Kanaya’s bed, she felt another twitch from the fingers on her wrist.

“I don’t think I should leave her alone,” she said, without turning to meet Kanaya’s questioning gaze as she clambered over Rose and into the empty spot where the bed met the wall. Rose’s slackening shoulders were her reward as she nestled closer to the blonde’s side. “She’ll wake up confused, I know she will.”

Jade didn’t open her eyes but she could feel Kanaya standing there, torn, and so she patted her palm on Rose’s other side, a sizeable gap on the other edge of the bed.

“Just sleep,” she mumbled, already feeling the slow pull of sleep. “She’ll feel safer.”

Rose’s head lolled against hers as Kanaya settled into the other side of the bed, hand brushing Jade’s arm as she put hers across Rose’s stomach.

At her feet Jade could feel a blanket, and she fumbled to tug it up over them. She heard Rose’s breathing even out, and in the soft green light of Kanaya’s lamp she fell asleep in minutes.


End file.
